You Can’t Crash if You Don’t Launch

Iterative product development is at the heart of many a startup founded on technological innovation as its core value driver. Lessons learned from earlier iterations (failures) inform the next prototype until the problems are solved, and requirements are met. Yet until you have lived this process, most startup stories only share the highlight reel of the successful tests, making it hard to appreciate what being part of a startup developing novel technology is really like. Here is a real-world reality check.

Recently, an offshore wind consultant we worked with at Accio Energy, a closed-in-2017 turbine-free offshore wind energy startup that I led for seven years, reached out. As part of the conversation, he shared the story of Makani, a startup developing airborne wind turbines (proof-of-concept flying in the North Sea 2:14 min), that I had been well aware of as we were overlapping in space and time.

Makani’s journey lasted 13 years, including a stint as part of Google X, before Alphabet killed it in 2020 because “Despite strong technical progress, the road to commercialization is longer and riskier than hoped.” Perhaps its work was before its time. Regardless, the Makani team’s innovations were so ground-breaking that Alphabet funded a full-length documentary film capturing the Makani journey and sharing the company’s learnings in the public domain with the hope that it would enable future teams to do so build on the work that was done. 

As I watched the film (Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani 1 hour 50 minutes), I was struck by the raw power of the story for startup teams. It captures the emotions, delicious complexity, massive uncertainty, and risk of doing something that has never been done before with a clarity that I don’t believe I have seen outside of having experienced it repeatedly in my work leading five different technology-based startups. If you are thinking of doing a technology-based startup, I commend Makani’s story to you as a reality-based picture of what the hard slog of an intense product development process looks like as the team cycles through failures and successes. Honestly, until the very crushing endstage, Makani’s story is what “success” looks like.

The film showcases the product development iterations that are the heartbeat of the early stages of a fast-moving startup that needs to solve multiple problems in parallel and ensure that the real-worlds of physics and user feedback are fed back into the process while producing the tangible evidence of progress required to secure future boluses of funding.

As I watched the Makani journey unfold, here are some of the moments that especially resonated for me, raising echoes of other startup experiences I have had. Hopefully, these tantalizing tidbits will encourage you to invest some time being inspired by the Makani team – and reflecting on the reality of startup product development:

• Set audacious target(s) that challenge the team to solve problems in a big way.
  
  
• Use iterative product development to solve many problems in parallel.
  
  
• Test in real-world conditions.  Simulations can only get you so far.
  
  
• Keep a laser focus on learning by attempting to fail faster. The very nature of the iterative process assumes at least partial failure at each iteration, enabling feedback that highlights problems that require solution refinements.
  
  
• Remember that success is not binary. There are first, second, and third levels of success, especially when you remember that discovering a new dimension you had not factored in before sooner (aka “failure”?) may be the key to unlocking the next level.
  
  
• By making things real, you discover things you could not imagine. And that discovery opens the path to radical progress.
  
  
• Drive for a more compelling value proposition.
  
  
• It takes guts to deal with the setbacks that occur.
  
  
• The whole team needs to embrace the sense of urgency of striving for the next milestone.
  
  
• Sometimes what you are doing is barely, barely feasible, if everything goes well.
  
  
• Consider what to add – and what to remove.
  
  
• Derisk. Derisk. Derisk. And then commit.
  
  
• You will need to work with uncertainty and risk. There isn’t time to be totally sure.
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• Remember to step back sometimes and see the beauty in what your amazing team is accomplishing.

The Makani team took an idea and carried it as far as possible, with vision and heart. Sometimes they experienced soaring success. And oftentimes frustrating failure. That is the nature of product development in the trenches. You can’t crash if you don’t launch!

Thank you, Charles Nordstrom, for highlighting the Makani story and being such a willing innovator!